Enterprise architects deal with huge expanses of complex data in their daily work. Discover how focusing in on the relevant information within SAP LeanIX can empower your architecture decision-making.
Enterprise architecture is about seeing the vast expanse of your IT landscape and ensuring it aligns with your business strategy. It’s a challenging prospect, but the key to success is focus.
Constantly maintaining awareness of every server and application that your company uses in real time would be overwhelming for any team. To succeed, enterprise architects need to filter that information to focus on the relevant data for any given project.
Moreso, enterprise architecture has to be a collaborative effort across your entire organization. To drive that group initiative, you need to empower each user with their own view of the relevant data they need.
As The Open Group’s Architecture Framework (TOGAF) standard states, organizations at the highest level of enterprise architecture maturity will ensure:
“Architecture documents are used by every decision-maker in the organization for every IT-related business decision.”
Seeing the relevant trees within an expansive forest is the real art of enterprise architecture. That’s why we’ve developed our new Workspace Views feature to support you.
Within SAP LeanIX, you can now create custom views that will deliver to your stakeholders just the relevant information for their interests. This allows each stakeholder to focus on what matters to them, making EA approachable for everyone to consume and contribute.
To find out more about our new Workspace Views feature, book a demo:
Enterprise architecture is a complex discipline that involves a tremendous amount of data. Tracking every software application and IT component in use in your organization is daunting enough for enterprise architects, let alone your stakeholders.
Imagine you’re looking out over an expansive forest. It will be difficult for even a specialist to identify which trees need to be cut down to let the forest thrive, let alone to explain that to a layman.
In just the same way, it’s challenging for enterprise architects to monitor your entire IT landscape and identify which items need to be retired and which need to be invested in. That information is, again, even more difficult for your stakeholders to comprehend.
This is particularly the case when your stakeholders are diverse. Some may just need to see the overview of your landscape, while others will only be specifically interested in data about your customer relationship management (CRM) system and nothing else.
To make your enterprise architecture information repository useful for all your different stakeholders, you need the option to zoom out to see an overview, and to zoom in and filter to see the specific information each stakeholder needs. Only an advanced tool could offer this ability to see your data from whatever viewpoint is relevant to you in the moment.
Enterprise architects would once be forced to make use of the standard set of workplace tools. Architecture information would be stored in Excel spreadsheets, decision approvals would be made over email, and results would be shared in PowerPoint presentations.
As time went on, it became clear that these standardized tools weren’t sufficient to handle the vast amounts of data that enterprise architects work with. That’s why we created SAP LeanIX.
Our solution allows enterprise architects to store information about their application portfolio and IT landscape in fact sheets that were designed for enterprise architecture information. These are fully customizable, meaning you can store whatever information you need to know about your landscape, from artificial intelligence (AI) use to sustainability data.
Once you have all of that information stored within the SAP LeanIX repository, our solution can visualize that data for you, in order to surface deep insight into your IT landscape. It’s so easy to create user-friendly reports and dashboards in SAP LeanIX that enterprise architects are telling us that their leaders want to see the data in the platform, rather than summarized in slide decks.
However, as more and more companies are leveraging SAP LeanIX, we're seeing larger and more complex IT landscapes represented in SAP LeanIX to a wider range of stakeholders. As such, we’re hearing about more stakeholders who need help finding the information that’s relevant to them among the expansive data within their instance of SAP LeanIX.
Enterprise architects know that the right answer is more important than a complete answer. When you’re proposing that you replace your current finance system with one that’s a better functional fit for your organization, you don’t need to explain how your predecessors replaced the previous system that you used to have ten years ago.
For that matter, to make a finance tooling decision, you don’t need to know about how your customer relationship management (CRM) system is doing or how many Zoom licenses you have. Some of your stakeholders will only need to see a high-level view of your IT landscape to understand your success, while others will want extensive detail about a niche area.
Talking to our customers, it’s clear that they need to be able to empower their stakeholders with the data that’s relevant to them at the level of detail that they need to see. To support them, we envisioned a version of SAP LeanIX that allows you to filter the information you’re seeing based on what you need to know.
This need goes all the way back to John Zachman’s first formulation of an enterprise architecture framework. Zachman proposed a grid whereby you would create different enterprise architecture artifacts according to the needs of different categories of stakeholders.
Zachman’s framework, however, left enterprise architects with a range of unconnected visualizations, rather than a coherent model of your IT landscape. Imagine, however, just such a model of that landscape that could be zoomed into and out of, as well as filtered, in order to show you just the parts of the whole you need to see without fracturing it.
If you need to fully understand what an elephant is like, what’s more useful to you?
The latter would be far more beneficial and the same applies to enterprise architecture. Being able to see your IT landscape from a variety of viewpoints in real time is far more helpful than seeing a jumble of artifacts and slides that show different interpretations without ever getting close to the real data.
That’s why we’ve created our Workspace Views feature. Using this, all your stakeholders can see your live IT landscape at the detail level they need.
Our new Workspace Views feature allows SAP LeanIX administrators to build custom views within SAP LeanIX that are specific to a role, project, or use case. These filter your IT landscape data like SAP LeanIX fact sheets, reports, and dashboards, so stakeholders see only what’s relevant to their work.
For instance, a view for business architects can focus on strategic elements, displaying business capabilities, core processes, and the applications that support current objectives and initiatives. This view would include dashboards and reports that track key performance indicators, upcoming project milestones, and relevant scenarios without overwhelming technical details.
On the other hand, a view for solution architects could drill down into the technical aspects. It would showcase platforms, applications, interfaces, IT components, and technology categories along with detailed diagrams and technical reports.
At the use case level, you could create a workspace view for artificial intelligence (AI) governance with AI usage data. You could also have an application rationalization workspace view with data based on the Gartner TIME matrix, or a cloud migration workspace view, etc.
Users can be part of multiple workspace views, allowing them to shift between different viewpoints on the same live data. This means you can move between a detailed view of your particular part of your IT landscape and a broad overview of the data with just a click.
To find out more about our new Workspace Views feature, book a demo: